I am the author of Silicon Dragon (2008) and Startup Asia (2012). My news and events group, Silicon Dragon Ventures (www.silicondragonventures.com), publishes e-newsletters, hosts a talk show, and develops forums in the world’s tech hotspots. I am the former international news editor of Red Herring, the Pulitzer-owned International Business, AdAge and Incisive Media. I have contributed to CEO, Inc., Worth, Fast Company, The Deal and Harvard Business Review, and am the founding editor of Digital Magazine News. My editorial consulting includes thought leadership reports for KPMG and Sony. In 2010, I provided expert testimony on China’s Internet for a Congressional commission in Washington, DC. I have appeared as a commentator on Fox Business News, Sky TV and CCTV. I have lectured at Yale, Columbia, NUS and Tsinghua, among others and spoken at the Asia Society, NASSCOM, World Affairs Council, Chamber of Commerce and Harvard Club.

Chinese Tech Star Jack Xu Looks To PaPa For His Next Hit

Chinese serial entrepreneur Jack Xu helped to craft the FacebookFacebook and Tumblr of China — RenrenRenren and Diandian – and now he’s put his tech artistry to work in developing a third startup based on a Chinese micro-innovation rather than a clone of a U.S. business model.

His latest startup, going by the name of PaPa, is somewhat like the popular photo sharing app Instagram but with more bells and whistles. PaPa layers in sound as the photo is displayed. Some 10 million users in China are already using the photo sharing and sound app, which was launched in late 2012.

It’s easy to see the appeal of PaPa. From his loft-like work space in Beijing’s 798 art district, Xu demonstrates how it works by holding up his mobile phone and showing me a photo taken by a friend of her new-born baby. Click on the image and you can instantly hear the baby’s first cry. Or, you can opt for any voice or music to play back.

After an exceptionally quick take off even in China’s fast-paced mobile app market, Xu is aiming for PaPa to reach 100 million users within two years in the Chinese market. He may also consider rolling out PaPa internationally, he says, if he can find the right U.S. partner.

It can’t hurt that Xu has connections with Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works. The Beijing-based angel investment and incubator group has financed PaPa — and also Xu’s previous startup Diandian.

Tech star Xu well represents a new generation of innovative, born-in-China entrepreneurs. They are transforming the whole Chinese startup culture, formerly defined by the copy-to-China strategy of the western-educated and seasoned returnees who cloned Amazon, GoogleGoogle, Facebook and eBay and took these startups public on the NYSE and NASDAQ.

At 33 years of age — what he calls middle age — Xu says he has the patience to continue building his startup over the next 10 years. Xu grew up in the central Chinese city of Hubei and set himself on the fast tech track by graduating with a degree in computer science from Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 2000 and catching the Internet wave in China at the right time.

He got his career start after being recruited by Chinese entrepreneur Joe Chen to write code at ChinaRen, an early version of social networking. When Charles Zhang, the founder of Chinese portal Sohu, bought ChinaRen in 2000, Xu stayed on for a few more years until 2005 when he rejoined Chen at Oak Pacific Interactive and worked on the social networking site Chen acquired in 2006, Xiaonei, later renamed Renren.

By the end of 2009, Xu had left Renren and took up a post as COO at the online division of gaming company Shanda. He was limited by a no-compete clause from working on a social networking rival to Renren. It wasn’t long before Kai-Fu Lee, looking to back star founders and particularly those in the mobile Internet space, encouraged Xu to do his own startup.

Having secured angel financing from Innovation Works in 2011, Xu launched Diandian, the Tumblr blog-hosting platform of China for the market’s heavy mobile use. Diandian soon soared to more than 5 million users.

Now the high-profile Internet entrepreneur Xu is taking a lot of pride in his team’s latest creation. PaPa is a brainchild of Xu’s core of four developers, searching for the next mega concept in mobile. Xu and his colleagues brainstormed every day for a month from their loft space above an art studio in northeast Beijing’s 798, a half-hour drive from the tech zone of Zhongguancun in the northwest of the city near Tsinghua University.

Far removed from the crowded Haidian tech district and the copycat mentality, Xu says he and his team were calmer, more Zen-like in their approach. Here in 798, once a complex of factories and warehouses that has now been converted into galleries, studios, restaurants and tech startup hubs, he says they were inspired to create brand new ideas from the heart rather than marketing-centered concepts.

Drawing an analogy with the originality of Steve Jobs, Xu tells how he and his co-founders huddled in a meeting room of the loft for two months, thinking up new mobile apps that would be easy to use and win over lots of users. They narrowed the ideas to five, including a location-based photo sharing app, but none really stood out as a winner.

Then, one morning, one of the developers proposed the concept of adding sound to the photos. The group was very excited about the idea, and when the engineers heard about it, wanted to start work on the software right away.

Before giving the green light, the team decided to see if everyone was still as excited about the idea the next day. They were.

“PaPa is about social because that is our passion, it’s about mobile and it’s about photos,” says Xu, explaining that he believes winning innovations are about a combination of ideas and ease of use.

In this era of the lean, fast-to-market startup, the mobile app was developed in only one month and then tested for another month. Dreamed up late last summer, PaPa was ready for launch in October 2012.

“A good idea is like art,” says Xu, as he serves me tea he’s meticulously brewed atop a wooden tea table in the center of his office beneath a framed Zen calligraphy print. ”You have to empty yourself, to calm yourself down to be creative,” he adds.

The team is already working on another new idea, inspired by a work environment that could just as easily be found in San Francisco’s Mission district. There’s a pool table and several bicycles parked next to open desks, and lots of graffiti on the building.

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